I’m Michael Barajas. I’m the VP of Technology and Security for a mail-order pharmacy, and I write here about the part of software nobody livestreams: running the team.

I spent about ten years building software, mostly in healthcare, before moving into leadership. Most of my experience is at smaller companies with deep technical and product problems, the kind where the founders were pharmacists who happened to start a technology company and were two years deep before anyone said it out loud. That turns out to be a great place to learn.

There’s a lot of good content out there from developers and very little from the seat where engineering meets leadership, so that’s the gap I’m writing into. So far that means things like what your first ninety days running a technology org actually look like, why your pay tracks your blast radius, and how to make someone prove an idea is worth building before it lands on your team. A theme keeps coming back: technology sits at the bottom of the company, and every decision made upstream rolls downhill onto it.

Every post here is recorded vlog style and transcribed more or less directly from the video to these posts.

This site runs on Hugo and the PaperMod theme, served by Caddy on a DigitalOcean droplet.